Occupy StrategyLab
Organizing Upgrade is excited to repost this Media Mobilizing Project interview with two Pennsylvania organizers about the impact of Occupy on rural Pennsylvania.
Episode Description: In this episode Audra and Miguel speak with Mitch Troutman and Kara Newhouse of PA from Below about the occupations across Pennsylvania sparked by #OccupyWallSt. We also get to see stories from occupiers in Philadelphia and across Pennsylvania, a report from the UNITE HERE action against Aramark for fair work conditions, and the recent Working People’s Media and Communications Forum.
On Jan 15, SOUL (The School of Unity and Liberation in Oakland) organized a panel and discussion on Occupy with veteran organizers from community and labor organizations who have been deeply engaged in the Occupy Movement. Maria Poblet (of Causa Justa/Just Cause), Shaw San Liu (of Chinese Progressive Association), and Brooke Anderson (of East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy) share lessons from on-the-ground mobilizations in Oakland & San Francisco, and exchange ideas about challenges and opportunities in this new moment in the fight against the 1%.
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Matt Bieber originally conducted this interview with Marshall Ganz via telephone on October 28, and it was originally published on The Wheat and Chaff. In the early 1960′s, Marshall Ganz dropped out of Harvard to join the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. He then spent 16 years working with César Chávez and the United Farm Workers before returning to Harvard to finish his BA and earn a Ph.D. in sociology. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he architected Barack Obama’s organizing effort. Ganz currently teaches at Harvard Kennedy School. In 2010, he published Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement.
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Marisa Franco interviewed Mohammed Abdohalli and Gopal Dayaneni about direct action and the Occupy Movement in November 2011.
The #Occupy movement has tapped into a collective frustration spanning across the globe. The rallying cry of 99% and the tactic of occupying public spaces has changed the conversation from one that continues to benefit the 1% to one that questions the political and economic system we live in and ventures to directly practice alternatives. It’s also a moment that has brought the power of direct action and civil disobedience to the public’s eye. more »
Winter Has Arrived. We Do Not Fear the Cold.
On September 17th, we took Liberty Square, used it to begin to create the social norms and institutions of a society to come, and became the Occupy Movement. We hit the streets fiercely, abandoning the metal barricades they once contained us in, rejecting the marching permits they offered us, refusing their sidewalks. We were dragged, handcuffed, into the front pages of people’s minds, and brought with us a story many were trying to silence – a story about the profit of the tiny few through the exploitation of the many, a story about deep and systemic economic, political, and social injustice. We danced in the streets and parks we reclaimed, and then in the jail cells they took us to when they realized we weren’t going home. We were confident, invincible; it’s hard to be afraid when the sun is out.
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The Occupy Strategy Lab of Organizing Upgrade is excited to share the thoughts of movement innovator and strategist Max Rameau. With his experience founding the Take Back the Land movement and advancing land-liberation and eviction defense strategies, Max is well positioned to provide some insight into how organizers can and should strategically connect with the Occupy movements. Over the last few months, Max has been engaged in strategic thinking, dialogue and planning with Occupy movements in Miami, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Wall Street. This article is part of a series in which Max explores the potential for movement building within the Occupy movements. Forthcoming pieces will address the Basis of Unity (between #Occupy and Liberate) and a proposal for a 2012 Spring Offensive.
Approximately 50,000 people turned out to mass actions held during the Oakland General Strike on November 2nd, called by the General Assembly of Occupy Oakland at Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant plaza, and supported by dozens of community based organizations, unions, and activist groups. The actions shut down every major bank in downtown Oakland, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Chase, and then shut down the port, and in the process built solidarity beyond anything we have seen in the SF Bay Area since the days of the movement against the US war on Vietnam.
One significant aspect of the relationship between community organizing and Occupy movement in New York City is the synergy between Occupy Wall Street and several community organizations that have been organizing around revenue issues for the past year. This piece is a dialogue between organizers from two of the organizations – Community Voices Heard and VOCAL New York (formerly known as New York City AIDS Housing Network / NYCAHN) – that have been active in that revenue organizing. This organizing around revenue issues – which included a civil disobedience action at the Capitol on March 1, 2011, a Wisconsin-inspired overnight occupation of the New York State Capitol in late March and the May 12th Mobilization on Wall Street – has put CVH and VOCAL in closer relationship with larger community organizations and labor unions on the one hand and, on the other, with many of the direct action activists who helped to initiate Occupy Wall Street. Since the occupation began in September, VOCAL and CVH have related to it in several different ways. In this interview, CVH and VOCAL organizers reflect on those experiences and discuss their vision for how those relationships should unfold.
SONDRA YOUDELMAN: Sondra is the Executive Director of Community Voices Heard (CVH) in New York State, a membership organization of low-income New Yorkers fighting to influence policy change around issues that affect low-income families. She serves on the Boards of the Pushback Network and Grassroots Global Justice, and she is active in National People’s Action and the Right to the City Alliance.
HENRY SERRANO: Henry is the Lead Organizer of Community Voices Heard (CVH) in New York State. He is also on the Boards of both the North Star Fund and the Progressive Technology Project.
JEREMY SAUNDERS: Jeremy Saunders has been organizing in New York since 2001. He has worked at ACORN, Community Voices Heard and the North West Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition. He is currently the lead organizer for VOCAL New York, formerly the NYC AIDS Housing Network (NYCAHN), which organizes low-income New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS, the formerly incarcerated as well as active and former drug users.
CHRIS KEELEY: Chris is the Coordinator of the New Deal for New York Campaign, a collaboration of community organizations across the state of New York that are working collaboratively to lift up the need for new revenue raising and increased investment in job creation and critical social services.
JEREMY: VOCAL got involved in the revenue fight when our flagship AIDS housing bill – which would have ensured that 10,000 low-income New Yorkers who are living with HIV/AIDS would not have to pay more than 30 percent of their income towards rent – was vetoed by Governor Paterson. Paterson had been supportive of the bill, but he said he couldn’t approve it because it would cost too much, and the state couldn’t afford it during a crisis. So then, we found ourselves stuck in these reactive fights to defend AIDS services in New York City. It was clear that these dynamics were only going to get worse – that we were going to end up focusing on defending a smaller and smaller pool of services – unless we fought on revenue issues. So, on March 1st of this year, VOCAL New York and CVH organized a big action in the hallways of the Capitol building to protest the fact that the government was cutting services for poor people at the same time as it was giving tax breaks to New York’s wealthiest. Seventeen people were arrested that day, and it got a lot of attention. Everyone – from the media to the police to elected officials – said that they hadn’t seen anything like it in a long time. That action put us on the map. It was what got us working with these larger community organizations, unions, and direct action activists. It helped to build towards the overnight occupation of the Capitol in late March and the May 12th actions on Wall Street. As we started to plan more and more actions together over time, we’ve built up good working relationships.
SONDRA: Community Voices Heard started getting involved in organizing around revenue and the big banks about a year ago. Recovery funds were dying out very rapidly. Everything that we were demanding was based on a proactive plan that would require more money, but instead we were having to fight against budget cutbacks. We felt like we needed to move into working on revenue issues and to really think about proactive revenue fights and alternative taxation campaigns if we were ever going to be able to win and fund any of the stuff our members wanted. At first, it was this weird wonky set of issues around taxes that seemed too disconnected. It didn’t resonate well with our members. Then, when the recession started to get talked about in the media, and there were tons of stories about inequality, our members began to react. “Recession? It’s a depression! And we’ve been experiencing this for years. But at least people are talking about it now.” The fact that government needed to be forced to invest back in people and communities if we were going to turn things around was pretty clear to our members. And, when government kept saying there was no money, that’s when the need to get it from the institutions and people that have more to give started making sense as something to work on. This recession put us in a moment where everyone needs the safety net, so we have a chance to build broader alliances around safety net fights. However, our members had hesitancy about what it means to build that broader front: will our issues get lost? When we fight for the broader safety net, our constituencies – like African American and Latino workfare workers – are not the main-ticket items that are going to get the press. But we knew we needed to build this broader fight around revenue if our issues were going to have any chance of winning. So we started working on the revenue campaign, which made it clear that we needed to do statewide work, perhaps with some new partners. It was during the May 12th actions that our organizations met some of the people who helped to initiate Occupy Wall Street. There were working relationships across our organizations and the activists, which has made it easier to integrate our work since it all exploded.
HENRY: There has also been a realignment of some of the other political forces that we’ve been working with: labor and some of the other community organizing alliances. Some of those broader forces have been humbled over the last several years, and – at the same time – we’ve been growing, so we’re more powerful than we were in the past. That doesn’t at all mean we have more people than they do, not even close. But there’s a perception that we have power. What was happening with some of those broader forces? The former ACORN forces have been in a period of transition because they were attacked organizationally and 
shut down; they have been rebuilding. The unions were humbled through the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) fight. They tried to pass EFCA proactively and instead they had their collective bargaining rights shot down across the country. Even Wisconsin – which is an important part of the inspirational narrative over the last year – was a reactive fight to defend collective bargaining. Labor has had to reconsider what they have been doing. At this point, union members have had to fight to defend basic quality of life issues, so it’s still a “self-interest” fight. But what’s changing is that it can’t just be a fight for a narrow self-interest. Even a fight around self-interest has to engage broader issues because of the crisis.
At the same time, things started shifting internally. Our members’ sentiments started changing after Egypt. We started to get calls from our leaders around these kinds of actions. I’ve been organizing at CVH for ten years, and this was the first time that our members started talking openly about being willing to take arrests. During a statewide strategy meeting, we talked about this spectrum of actions that went all the way out to more militant actions including civil disobedience. When we got to the point in the spectrum that talked about civil disobedience, at first everyone was silent. And then one woman stood up and said, “We just need to go Egypt on their ass.” I saw a real change in the sentiment in the leadership during that meeting. They had been going through these long, slow struggles, and now they were ready to get more aggressive. That was around the same time that we connected with VOCAL to start this statewide work around revenue.
SONDRA: So our work was shifting externally around our issues and we were shifting internally in terms of tactics. And there was a realignment of the groups that we were working with. All of that positioned us to be players at a state level in a way that we weren’t before. And then the Occupy moment happened, which opened a whole new amount of space. We were on this trajectory of building statewide power, and then suddenly there’s this massive shift in public consciousness that we could take advantage of.
HENRY: We have been working on issues related to revenue and the big banks for about a year now. In that work, we have been working on parallel tracks with the activists who initiated Occupy Wall Street, and our work intersects. About six weeks ago, we started planning a week of action around the banks that was largely driven by labor, and then Occupy Wall Street pops up. We’ve continued to work with them, and what they have been adding is scale and media attention. For example, we had been planning this “Millionaires Tour,” and we expected to have about 150 people participate. We got 700 people. And, for the first time that I’ve ever seen, our action became a joke on Saturday Night Live: this guy who was playing Bloomberg started giving addresses to other rich peoples’ houses so they’d leave him alone. That kind of attention impacts our members. Our membership has always felt isolated in their fights. They feel solid in directing the actions and doing some incredible work, but they have always felt isolated and like no one pays attention to them. And now suddenly the media is paying attention to us. We have gotten more media hits than we’ve ever gotten. That came under the banner of “Occupy Wall Street” but – when that banner comes together with our organizing – it can have a more tangible policy impact. Occupy Wall Street…they aren’t trying to have a concrete policy impact, and I think that’s fine. They bring general frustration about the bigger issues. I wouldn’t actually want them to put more structure on that or develop more concrete demands. I would discourage them from taking on a specific issue or a structure. What they bring is a different level of scale and media attention to a wide range of issues.
JEREMY: We had the same experience. VOCAL went down to Occupy Wall Street with five members, and they had turned that into 300 people within 48 hours. Our five members worked with a handful of Wall Street organizers to organize somewhere between 300 and 500 people to march to the District Attorney’s office and then to march on Cuomo. We went down there that day because we had this leader from VOCAL who had participated in the OWS actions when they were trying to evict them. He got the shit knocked out of him by a cop, and his attack became one of the most prominent attacks by the cops because of how blatant and, probably more importantly, because it was widely captured on video. So we organized a march to the DA’s office calling for the investigation of all OWS attacks, an end to all police attacks and to demand the NYPD stop listing our leader, Felix, as wanted. Here was this low-income person living with AIDS who’s homeless and who is a highly marginalized person at the protest that day. Just yesterday, we found out the charges have been dropped. After the DA action we mic-checked
to the crowd that Gov 1%, Cuomo was going to get a “Gamechanger” award from HuffPo across town, so we led about 200 to 300 people across town to protest Cuomo as well. There is just a huge shift in the kind of scale and an energy that you can mobilize quickly right now.
HENRY: That may start to change now that OWS doesn’t just want to be a “mob for hire.” They don’t just want to show up to action to be there. They may start organizing their own stuff and stop showing up at ours. We’ll see.
SONDRA: That’s their strength, not ours. Our strength is not in having thousands of people in the streets or holding one big march. It’s consistent action around the public debate – whether that’s through media or hitting a target strongly or creatively enough to get attention. You don’t actually need thousands of people to do that.
HENRY: We should take the relationship between our work and theirs as far as it goes. We shouldn’t try to decide what they’re going to do. It’s a different constituency with different class issues and different racial issues. I’m not big on critiquing Occupy Wall Street for being a bunch of white people. White people should do these kinds of things. They have specific issues. They’re 63% of this country. Yes, they are entitled in a way that we will never have among our membership. But that kind of entitlement isn’t bad. We could use more of it. They are more entitled in their demands and in their approach to confrontation. Right now, white people are the majority while we’ve always represented a strong minority. You’re going to approach politics differently when that’s the situation.
JEREMY: There is a certain level of absurdity to people – including progressive groups – saying things like “Wow. This is amazing. We’ve never seen anything like this before.” Organizers have always known that if you did crazy shit, you’d get media coverage. Earlier this year, we did this occupation in Albany, and we got a ton of media. We’ve shut down the Capital. Other organizers have taken over highways and shut down cities. Another part of the absurdity is how much people forget when these kinds of militant actions have happened before. Like ACT-UP marching down the street with a dead body, or the May 1st immigrants rights march or the time when Justice for Janitors took over the freeways in Los Angeles. The World Trade Organization demonstrations and the FTAA protest in Miami were also good examples of a moment when there was strong (though usually off the record) labor-activist support and collaboration. There’s such a forgetfulness on our part, to read this moment like nothing like this that has ever happened. There’s been an anger in this country for a long time that we’ve seen explode in a number of ways. It may have been stifled but that doesn’t mean that we should forget about it.
SONDRA: There are some things that are different about this moment though. I think that occupying a physical space for an extended period of time adds a new element. Of course, not everyone is focused on occupying that space. There are many community organizers and leaders that are going in and out of the physical occupation over time. But it’s significant that they have created a space where people can go and – just by going – they can feel like they are part of a movement, whether they sleep there for a month or go down there for an hour.
HENRY: We’re looked at as part of the political system. They are looked at as organic. The fact that they don’t have an issue is an advantage. We say, “We want money for public housing.” They are saying, “I’m angry at our government.” That’s great. They should do this broad messaging and visioning stuff. We can do the policy stuff. That’s fine. They can take care of organizing on emotion; we’ll organize on policy. We have to keep doing our own very specific policy and campaign work. No one else will take that on, and the issues of our constituencies will get lost. The best way to interact with the Occupy movement is that we need to occasionally interact with each other, connect in specific moments around specific actions.
SONDRA: It would be stupid to reorient everything around Occupy Wall Street. And it would be stupid to not realize that we can’t do the same old thing in this moment. It’s a fluctuating environment. We need to keep our focus on the place where were trying to get to, keep our eye on where we’re headed in terms of building power for low-income families (like we’re focusing on a point far in the distance) and be ready to navigate reality as it changes and shifts. My hope is that this moment helps us shift that long-term vision to the left. That’s my hope for Occupy: to shift everything to the left. Occupy Wall Street creates a moment when we can push for more around policy, more in terms of our demands. If we need to do anything with respect to Occupy Wall Street, it’s to push them to make sure to keep pushing. Because even the radical organizing groups have been limited to fighting around crumbs. We don’t need them to consolidate into a 501c3 and consolidate their issues into specific demands. They need to do what they’ve been doing: to focus on the public discourse and create a climate where it’s not crazy to call for bigger things.
JEREMY: My general feeling is that this collaboration is great and needs to continue. When it comes to our organizations’ involvement I do have concerns. I’m worried that this can detract from all ongoing work that has major impact on our membership/constituency. We’re being asked by progressive allies, funders and a few OWS work groups to engage in various ways, like meetings, actions and so on. We want to stay connected. We want to continue to find moments where we can support each other, but we have to realize that the amount of time we dedicate to OWS takes away from other work. There’s just no way around that.
We’ve got to keep doing our work. We can’t let go of the campaigns we’re working on, which are all about addressing specific issues impacting our membership that others aren’t going to take up (and don’t necessarily need to) like the AIDS housing bill or changes to welfare. At the same time, we have to find moments to connect with and support Wall Street with our members when it’s around issues that we both support. This has been happening pretty well. We have to think about building a core team of people from OWS who want to help support and build community organizations that haven’t been able to grow to scale in the past because they lack a broad base of volunteers. There’s a number of OWS protesters who’ve shown that they’re willing to dedicate time and energy and want to support building stronger grassroots organizations.
I’ve heard this continued call by the progressive community, prior to OWS, to get out of our silos, to build collaboratively, to build a broader movement. We at VOCAL feel like we’ve done that in a serious way. We’ve gotten out of our silo, dedicated serious time and resources to fighting for a fair economy. We rarely ask for our agenda to be included, because we realize it’s not the space for that and that there are moments to put that to the side for the larger cause and to accept that we’ll have to fight for our specific campaigns on our own. We get a small amount of resources to do this work, and it often doesn’t feel mutually beneficial. It often feels like we’re being asked to take action by much larger, better-resourced organizations, without recognition of our ongoing work. I don’t mind joining coalitions, breaking out of silos, and I don’t even mind others not taking on our issues, but it has to come with some acknowledgement of what’s at stake and why some of us may feel hesitant to drop everything to “join the 99%.” I think this is a moment when those dynamics can start to change and – regardless – we know that we need to throw in on the fight around the economy. So we’ll be down there. We just hope it will play out differently this time.
HENRY: The next step is that we have to open up the political opportunities for our membership, so our membership can get more engaged in this sense of entitlement that happens at OWS. OWS is hungry to have conversations with the communities that we work with. We haven’t gotten our members down there enough to have interactions so they can engage and help to move what’s going on down there. In some ways, staff may have even acted as a barrier for our members going down there. It could be important to figure out how to engage our 
members in the organic process down there. Our members have been fighting in their individual lives forever, and they’ve been fighting collectively with us for a few years. But being down there will give them a sense of being part of a much larger movement. Our leaders have experience in direct action, in campaigns, in not being intimidated by people in power. The people down at Occupy Wall Street could benefit from that. And our members could benefit from this sense of entitlement.
CHRIS: Getting members to go down to Wall Street is an important part of the political opportunity. Occupy Wall Street is seen as the anchor for the broader Occupy movement around the country. If we can build relationships and they acknowledge the members and leaders of the community organizations that have been part of this fight for a long time, Occupy Wall Street could serve as a model for other occupations in other cities and help build some important relationships.
At a time when states and cities are fighting back austerity measures, organizers in Chicago are flipping the script! Instead of asking policy makers to stop making cuts, they are exclaiming ‘Show me the Money’! Taking up the #Occupy moment, Grassroots Collaborative Executive Director Amisha Patel sits with OrgUp editor Sushma to discuss a recent victory: an agreement with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel to return $60 million in social services for the People.
Q: This year marks historic outburst and outcries by the American public against budget cut backs and austerity measures. From February’s uprising in Madison, Wisconsin to #OccupyWallSt mobilizations last week, people are coming out of the woodwork. Why now?
A. The housing collapse in 2008 finally signaled to the mainstream that something is wrong with this system, though people of color and poor communities have known this for some time. The Right took hold of the narrative and used the moment to connect with the squeezed white middle class, and moved them with anti-government rhetoric that built on resentment and frustrations that had finally boiled over.
Progressives, however, have increasingly broken through. And what’s done it has been bold direct action grounded in long-term grassroots organizing that captured the sentiment of the majority. The 2008 winter occupation of Republic Windows by UE rank and file workers did just this. So did Mohamed Bouazizi in Jan 2011. The takeover of the Madison statehouse continued this work. Occupy Wall Street, and the birth of hundreds of acts of resistance, is yet another continuation. This isn’t to say that the conditions for each of these efforts are the same, but they all point to the sparking power of direct action that directly confronts the corporate agenda, particularly when organizations and movements of people are ready to sustain the momentum with clear demands that speak to majorities of people.
In Chicago, we have been strategic about how to move direct actions around our organizing campaigns. We have effectively built upon the national attention of Occupy Wall Street, and the effort is grounded in local organizing. Through a broad community and labor coalition, we organized a march of 7000 people in October to protest two conventions of the financial elite. We followed the mass action with days of planned actions and civil disobedience, generating tremendous coverage and effectively changing the narrative.
Q. While many movements are criticizing the cutbacks and spending cuts, some Chicago organizations tried another tack. You flipped the script. Instead asking to end cutbacks, you called for increasing revenue generation. Where did this idea come from and how did Chicago’s decision makers respond?
A.Grassroots Collaborative groups and our allies have been fighting for more revenue at the state and local levels for years. This stems from a shift in strategy as the economic crisis became justification for the right to slash the public sector and services to low-income communities. If we continued to have a reactive fight against cuts, we would be pitting ourselves against many other equally critical programs and services. For us all to win, we need to expand the pie.
In 2008, we spearheaded a coalition called the Campaign for Illinois’ Future that brought together over 130 groups to fight for an income tax increase. By launching a hunger strike that included an 87-year old neighborhood leader, we wrested attention away from the corruption-focused media circus surrounding ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich, to the dangerous state of Illinois’ budget and its impact on women and communities of color.
Our work addressing revenue in Chicago came from a power analysis we led with 20 key labor and community organizations immediately following the election of Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Spring 2011. Consensus emerged that the ultimate power of the Mayor lies in the corporate power that elected him. We realized that we could no longer keep running issue campaigns that did not reframe the corporate agenda. So, we developed a strategy to move campaigns for revenue that targets city subsidies (Tax Increment Financing dollars) meant for blighted communities.
On the eve of the Mayor’s inauguration in May, the Grassroots Collaborative held our first action on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), who received $15 million in our TIF dollars to renovate their bathrooms. Last year, the CME posted a profit of nearly $1 billion dollars, yet took our tax dollars away from our classrooms and our libraries so they could install golden toilets. It’s a message that resonated powerfully with the broader public.
On Oct 16, 2011, one week after introducing the RBO, Mayor Emanuel agreed to declare a 20% TIF surplus, sending $60 million back to our public services.
From the beginning, Mayor Emanuel repeatedly rejected the idea of declaring a TIF surplus. The Collaborative’s strategy was to do a series of creative, public actions that captured our message powerfully and shifted public support against corporate welfare. We held a Bake Sale for Billionaires, we held class on the sidewalk outside the CME, and conducted a Corporate Welfare Tour via trolley through the streets of downtown.
Meanwhile, we introduced legislation that directly challenged Mayor Emanuel on the TIF Surplus. Called the Responsible Budget Ordinance, our legislation calls for a 50% TIF surplus declared, and would return hundreds of millions of corporate slush money back to our struggling schools, parks, libraries, and City.
On Oct 16, 2011, one week after introducing the RBO, Mayor Emanuel agreed to declare a 20% TIF surplus, sending $60 million back to our public services.
We continue to push for our 50%, but this victory is significant for several reasons:
- We forced the City to move significant dollars from what has become a downtown corporate slush fund to our neighborhood schools, parks and libraries, bringing revenue into public services at a time when most cities are cutting back
- We changed the narrative. Even Crain’s Chicago, our right-leaning business journal, wrote articles in support of our position against the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and reader comments overwhelmingly supported our position as well. This resulted from a key columnist taking interest in our Bake Sale for Billionaires action at the CME – it was a clever message that resonated with him and readers and put us on the radar
- In a time of regular defeats, it is critical that we claim this victory to grow momentum, acknowledge the reform achieved, and continue building. Our low-income, majority Black and Latino leaders are energized around this work, are constantly developing their skills and knowledge around taking on the corporate agenda, and are forceful advocates for taking on corporate power and winning a people’s budget.
Q. We are rumored to be on the precipice of a double-dip recession.What new strategies do you see union and community organizers taking on in the face of such possibilities?
We’re at an interesting moment with the national and international attention that Occupy efforts have brought to what’s not working with capitalism, but the conversations still must be deepened. We do this by looking at 1) history, 2) participation, 3) collaboration, and 4) theory/imagination.
History. I was at a gathering a few weeks back to mark the release of a new book on Gale Cincotta. The room was full of movement leaders active in that era. Some remarked with dismay how little things have changed from the 70s to present time – that the signs protestors carried back then could be carried at an Occupy march today.
A different perspective is that we must know what we’ve done before to understand how we have arrived at the moment we are in. Cincotta’s march on the American Banker’s Association preceded Take Back Chicago’s march on the ABA by 30 years. It failed to ignite the movement she had hoped for, yet 3 decades later, Occupy Wall Street exists. Its worth considering how many of our “failures” are actually instead sparks with the potential to ultimately shift the paradigm. Maybe if we knew that, we would never stop trying.
Participation. As organizers, we must continually deepen our leadership development work – and get to the place where people of color and working class leaders are deeply connected with one another, because we cannot take on the oppressions we’re up against if we’re in silos, or tokens at press conferences. The Collaborative has worked steadily to move beyond superficial engagement with our leaders, as we have tired of waging great multi-year campaigns that don’t lead to greater capacity or connection at our base.
We must be in connection and in deep community so that we can undo the internalized effects of the classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, colonization, genocide, and every other form of oppression. We must sustain and grow spaces of learning and engagement that create real space for grassroots leaders to grow themselves as they grow the work. We must recognize that getting our minds back is just as key as creating good policies and transforming structural inequities.
Collaboration. Labor and community efforts could lead to work that is both deep and at scale, but only if both are open to learning from each other and innovating new strategies. We must continue to articulate what we are for, and not simply what we’re against.
The current structures and frameworks for most labor unions and community organizations do not support this work. It requires us to go beyond the union contract, and the measurable objective of the policy win. Community Unionism sees that the decriminalization of youth of color, the defense of public housing, and the end to sexual violence are economic justice issues.
In Chicago, issues of turf remain strong 40 years after the death of Saul Alinsky. Recent work though has pushed against the traditional barriers to movement building, creating shared platforms, analysis, and strategies for change. The Grassroots Collaborative has played a useful role in this effort. We organized 2600 people from 25 community organizations to create a citywide push for a people’s agenda during the muni elections. We followed this with a People’s City Council meeting that brought together 19 aldermen and 1600 energized community leaders and rank and file workers taking on the corporate agenda.
Theory. Imagination. As the economy continues to worsen, the question emerges: what are we doing now to prepare to rebuild society, and how will we create a world that supports the liberation of all people? What are we doing to make sure that low-income people and people of color not only survive the collapse, but are the center of building anew?
We must work with our leaders on their early experiences of poverty, racism, sexism etc, because as the economy worsens, feelings of discouragement and hopelessness will continue to get kicked up. We must do this work ourselves as well. We are still figuring it out ourselves at the Collaborative, but it seems that if we want to imagine another world is possible, let alone build it, we must undo the effects on us of the current one.
The power of telling our stories grounded in smart analysis has shifted the sense of what is possible in this city. There is more work to be done. But taking on the corporate agenda to win revenue for our communities has grown our power significantly, and has helped to finally begin to shift the narrative.
Amisha Patel serves as the Executive Director of the Grassroots Collaborative, a community-labor coalition working to win racial and economic justice in Chicago and Statewide. This follows six years of work at Service Employees International Union Local 73, where she organized hospital employees and Head Start workers, as well as worked in coalition with community organizations to fight against school closings and to win more resources for parks in communities of color. She worked for five years doing arts-based violence against women prevention programming in communities of color in the Bay Area. The documentary that her youth created, Young Azns Rising! Breaking Down Violence Against Women, screened in numerous film festivals and won the Asian Emmy for best documentary.
Boston Shows Us How to #Occupy with Purpose and Political Vision
Presley Obasohan is fighting foreclosure on his home by Bank of America. Mr. Obasohan is underwater on his loan because in Dorchester, MA – the most diverse neighborhood in Boston – building values have sunk to half or less of mortgage loan debt. Presley is trying to save his home for his daughters. He has petitioned and he has pled. He has waited on hold and stood in line. But on Friday, Presely joined the Right to the City Alliance in a mass action of civil disobedience, and was proudly arrested, along with 23 other Boston residents, for siting in at the Boston headquarters of Bank of America.
“I blocked the doors at Bank of America so that my neighbors, and me, can stay in our homes,” Presely told the press. “So many people have been thrown out of their homes or lost their jobs needlessly because of mistakes made by Wall Street Banks. Yet it’s the banks who are now rewarded with billions in tax refunds. Its time to fight back!”
Bank of America announced Friday that it would begin charging customers $5 per month to use their debit cards. This comes after B of A received $230 billion in taxpayer bailouts and other assistance since 2008 and received a $4.2 billion dollar tax refund for 2009, and as the nations largest lender has ramped up foreclosures on distressed homeowners in recent weeks, according to new data from the foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac. August 2011 saw the largest monthly increase in foreclosures since August 2007, right after the housing bubble burst.
As of March 2011, Bank of America had more homes in foreclosure than any other bank in Boston, with
two-thirds of these in “majority minority” neighborhoods. 61% of Bank of America’s subprime mortgages were concentrated in these same neighborhoods, revealing a pattern of pushing bad loans on People of Color and
the poor.
Building an Urban Alliance for Municipal Power
Across the country, we are seeing the same story: the mortgage bubble created by Wall Street pushed predatory lending on urban communities, and since the bubble burst the fall out has been catastrophic. Unemployment and foreclosure have hit communities of color first and worst. This has exposed a national economy that cannot produce wealth or jobs for working class people. The economy is therefore unable to get out of a deep, deep recession. Meanwhile, the right wing gets more and more entrenched in protecting the rights of corporations and banks to hoard wealth and to plunder the planet.
The combination of these factors means that we are hurling headlong into cascading meltdowns in the economy, ecosystem,, and in the very fabric of social relations in our cities. Between the apartheid-type laws in Arizona and Alabama to the murder of Troy Davis in Georgia, we are living in dangerous times.
But in this time of crisis, it is urban communities who are at the forefront of the movement to fight back. It is People of Color organizations that are building out a more deliberate and powerful direct action flank of their organizing to demand payback from Bank of America and Wall Street, and to fight for transformation of our urban spaces – the places that are the economic engine rooms of global capitalism.
The courageous action by Presley Oboshaun came at the end of a raucous march of over 3,000 people carrying colorful banners and banging drums to confront the nation’s largest lender for their role in the economic crisis. The march was led by members of City Life/Vida Urbana and the Right to the City Alliance, who carried signs that told their stories of predatory lending and foreclosure. As the rowdy procession snaked through downtown, they were joined by members of UNITE/HERE picketing at the Hyatt Hotel, and CWA picketing at Verizon Wireless.
The march and action was called by the Right to the City Alliance, a national movement of urban economic and racial justice organizations, deeply rooted in the neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by the implosion of the economy, and where centuries of economic and racial oppression is compounding the crisis.
Recognizing that the current political moment calls for a broad unification of key forces, Right to the City built an impressive coalition of over 50 organizations with progressive organized labor, the Green Justice Coalition, the Youth Jobs Coalition, the Immigrant Rights movement, and a diverse array of progressive groups to pull together one of the best organized and widely covered marches in recent memory.
This coalition was a representation of Right to the City Alliance’s strategy for municipal power. This strategy is to intentionally unite the core constituencies of the alliance’s member organizations with other sectors of the progressive community: progressive labor and urban environmentalists. Right to the City is advancing a program of community defense, and pro-active agenda setting to fight for the type of cities that will benefit the constituencies and provide solutions to address the root causes of the crises
Take Back The Block – #Occupy the Hood
On Saturday, Right to the City took their message into the neighborhood. The Four Corners area of Dorchester has been ravaged by foreclosures, with some streets seeing 5 or 6 properties totally abandoned. Led by the community organizing powerhouse City Life/Vida Urbana, the group staged an occupation of a wrongly foreclosed home, hoping to return it from the hands of Deutsche Bank to its rightful owner, a family who was illegally evicted and has left the area.
The action team cleaned the home, brought in donated furniture, hung art on the walls and a banner off the porch. Hundreds toured the house and cheered in solidarity from the street, while music played and children danced.
Meanwhile the youth of Roxbury’s Alternatives for Community & Environment took over an abandoned lot and created a community garden “so that the community can grow our own food.” They asked people to stand with them for a blessing ceremony of the garden, and asked for food to grow strong and the land and community to heal and be healthy. They told the story of their journey to the 2010 US Social Forum, and how they had toured a community garden created by young people in Detroit, and been inspired to create a similar project in Boston.
Right to the City supported their vision and tied it to a movement building action about the banks and the political moment. It was a powerful example of the practical and visionary action that is needed in order to begin reclaiming our homes, our dignity, our cities.
Movement Momentum: Harnessing The Psychic Break
These bold actions in Boston unfolded in concert with the #OccupyWallStreet protests and the launch of #occupyBoston, an offshoot inspired by the infamous encampment in Zucotti park in lower Manahattan. The growing popular sentiment against Wall Street was an inspiring backdrop for the action, and indicates a growing frustration with the status quo by all walks of life.
So what is the role of community organizers and progressive leaders in this moment of #occupy momentum? After the dramatic mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge and the #occupy meme is spreading like wild fire, progressive and liberal forces are rapidly aligning around the protests.
At smartMeme, we have a theory about “the Psychic Break:” a moment when the dominant narrative unravels and there is an opening for a new story to take hold on a massive scale. We saw this moment come and go in 2008 when the stock market collapsed, $700 billion was given to financial giants, and progressives mostly stayed home and kept quiet while the Tea Partyers got into position.
But we believe that #occupyWallStreet is re-opening that window and provoking another such psychic break moment, an opportunity that community groups, progressive labor and environmentalists cannot allow to pass by.
The Right to the City Alliance actions were organized and led by decades-old community-based organizations, led by People of Color and rooted in People of Color communities. This work will go on for decades after #occupy stops trending on Twitter, but there is a clear understanding of the need to join these movements together and seize the political moment.
In Boston, Right to the City leadership shaped the message and the coalition building strategy, and made demands on Bank of America and other corporate targets. Right to the City had the vision, the know-how, and the people power to make this march a huge success. It was organized long before the occupation of Wall Street or the hastily planned takeover of Dewey Square next to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, but the alliance stands in solidarity with these encampments and those to come throughout the country and is working to help fortify and expand them.
One week later on “Columbus Day”/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the Right to the City led coalition in Boston was in active collaboration with the #OccupyBoston encampment, and over 2,000 people marched together to demand jobs, and end to wars and Wall Street greed. It is not surprising that this alliance, with the muscle of labor and community base-building groups behind it, represented enough of a threat that the Boston Police moved in to clear part of the encampment last night. Over 50 people were arrested and many are still in custody. The networks built by Right to the City have been activated to support the protests and mobilize support, as well as advise on strategies to move forward. This is a model for how the work must be joined and the potential that this moment holds.
We have an opportunity to offer a narrative of explanation about what has happened, how we got here, and how we can move forward together. We are faced with the potential of rooting this insurrectional energy into a strong social movement that can rival the Tea Party and change the story about our economic system, solutions to the crisis, and deepening democracy. The actions by Right to the City in Boston offer us an instructive model on the kind of analysis and organizing strategy that is necessary now.
This moment requires the building of a united front that will not dissipate after the march/rally/campaign is over. The task before us is to create strategic alliances locally, regionally nationally and beyond, to be prepared to make compromise but hold fast to our principles and the dire need for those most affected to be leading the charge. Like the 30,000 who marched in support of Occupy Wall Street on October 5th in New York, our numbers must swell and represent this united front.
But we must be agile and graceful and bold enough – like the ballerina on the bull of the #occupyWallStreet poster. We must be visionary and courageous and tenacious enough – like the youth of Roxbury blessing their occupied garden. And we must be brave enough, like Presley Obasohan, to put our bodies on the line and commit civil disobedience against the banks and for the people and planet that we love.
If we can do this, and build in good faith together to harness this moment and channel the momentum towards fundamental, radical social change – we just might be witnessing the stirrings of the new world that beats in our hearts. Let us dance to that beat, sing to this beat, and march together to this beat …all the way down to Wall Street. #occupytogether!
Doyle & Rachel worked together to amplify the impact of these actions in Boston.
Doyle Canning is co-director of the narrative strategy center smartMeme, and is co-author of Re:Imagining Change – How to Use Story-based Strategies to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World (PM Press, 2010). She lives in Boston.
Rachel Laforest is the Executive Director of Right to the City Alliance. She lives in New York.
